Confusion in three parts

I I feel the September chill Walking through my bones Like the echoes of all the things I forgot to do. Suddenly I take great solace in stillness; The silence of the soul that soothes itself In a balm quieter than all other ointments. I remember Olympus, though invisible, In the dark that is so abundant here Against the rhythms of our breath Sending incomprehensible waves To the tired, sore insides of another Burning like black rags, soaked in petrol. How am I supposed to know what I should be when I am sixteen? Am I somehow like a ridiculous Patronised semblance of an adult Queer in her handwriting and vulnerable Of soul? How can I counter the salt That seasons every wound with bitterness The crystals that sting pain around Every corner and the seasons that slip Through your fingers like dust? Once I do know you it will be too late Because I will already be a murderess In that fumbling embarrassment That is clear and brazen as Aphrodite— Pink before her period. Clear, that terribleness that shrinks and curls The corners of the soul like burning crisp packets Weak, black, and blown away in the wind.

II Don’t moisten my eyes with your confusion Deep as oceans and vast as cities I cannot sleep enough in that time To fill me up with blue analgesic My vacuole is still budding, uncomfortable Within me and stretching my skin like a tumour. Its emptiness makes me afraid of my skin, Afraid that it will no longer shut me in and protect me As one entity. This emptiness will destroy My solidity, poignant as separating into fragments Electrocuted into bareness in the face Of cruel scrutiny on transparent gel.

III This is my purging Harsh and sharp as my steel tipped pen That now presses into the page Releasing a fresh, invisible pain. This is my stomach acid Repellent as anorexia And extreme as such: ridding My soul of all things insidious and parasitical— A foreign cancer, but still black as night And sickening as worms. It drifts me away on a current To a wide sea of unfounded perplexity A forest as thick and meaningless as a bad poem— It carries me through. In the ticking of a few minutes I will be there And all that will be left is exhaustion And the faint fingerprint of my heat on the pen.

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